DynamicWebPages.de reports that the latest PHP release candidate has been posted by Ilia - PHP 5.1.3RC1.

Ilia Alshanetsky, release manager of PHP 5.1, has published the first release candidate of the upcoming 5.1.3 version of PHP. It's mainly a bug fix release, but the PCRE library was updated to version 6.6 and the CGI interface has been updated quite a bit as well. Other items improved included updates to the SPL, Reflection APU, cURL support and the GD functionality. The SimpleXML engine was also updated to allow for the use of namespaces with the addChild and addAttribute functions.

On PHPKitchen today, Demian Turner has posted a a few words about one of the latest PHP-related books he's read, "PHP5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice" from APress.

I recently read Matt Zandstra's PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice and thought I'd say a few good words about it for those who haven't been recommended yet. A lot of good PHP5 books have come out recently, eg something like PHP 5 Power Programming is an excellent resource for the finer points of charset issues, utf8 in PHP, timezone gotchas. But it's quite unusual in PHP circles for a book to come out that gives overall sound advice on application design.

I found Matt, who comes from a Java background, really hit the nail on the head, this book is an enjoyable read. While the first few chapters make allowances for readers who don't have a lot of exposure to OOP, the rest is quite a stimulating read, helped along in no small part by Matt's excellent unambiguous writing style.

According to this post on DynamicWebPages.de today, the first Release Candidate of the PHP 4.4.2 series has been posted.

Derick Rethans, the release manager for the upcoming PHP version, 4.4.2, has published the first Release Candidate for this series. Those who use PHP under Apache 2 or mod_rewrite right now, are specifically being asked to test this release. There have been reports of failures with this specific setup.

All further changes of the version can be found in the Changelog. Originally, the final version was going to be released on Tuesday. However with the help of a few industrious testers, the few errors can found (like the crashing issue with Apache 2) and taken care of so that the new release candidate shouldn't be far behind.